Microsoft Translator may be your new best friend for international travel.

According to Microsoft, you can point your phone at signs, menus, flyers, or anything else that has text visible and get an instant translation. The feature also works with saved images in your phone’s gallery or anywhere else you grab a photo from.

Another clever feature is inline translation, which allows you to highlight text from an app, open up the Other Options menu and then choose Translator to get the content translated to one of 52 different languages (this feature requires Android Marshmallow).

Microsoft

The new Inline Translation feature will translate text inside of another app.

Microsoft has also updated the available language packs, which you can download directly.

If you want to give the new Microsoft Translator app a try, grab it now from the Google Play Store.

The impact on you: While Google Translate is probably still tops in this department, Microsoft has done a lot of work to catch up. The Redmond company is making heavy bets on artificial intelligence and language learning, as evidenced by the powers of Cortana and efforts like the ill-fated Twitter bot Tay.

This story, "Microsoft Translator now translates text from images, increases language support" was originally published by
Greenbot.

To comment on this article and other PCWorld content, visit our Facebook page or our Twitter feed.